My search for “Virilio grey ecology”, in the context of the last post, sent me astray, passing Ian Douglas on Private Authorship, wandering off further and further. That’s when del.icio.us comes in handy. Private Authorship has some interesting quotes, and points to necessary relationships, but concludes on a too happy note:

Perhaps we should subject to analysis the regime of truth within which the notion of ‘authorship as critique’ is located, and in particular that of the “sovereign individual.” Perhaps we should see in this phrase what it really means: the melding of two forms that have fought each other through history — the state-form based in discipline and training, and the nomad, or people-form enamoured of freedom. Perhaps by so doing we can uncover not only the history of the diffusion of authority, but the political history of the creation of authors — not only of the truth of the voice which can speak, but the political history of the knowledge which is spoken.

I wonder if one should speak of, or want to construct, a notion of a ‘people-form (of authorship, voice) enamoured of freedom’. It seems like a rather optimistic idea, like the ‘noble amateur’. The ‘political history of the creation of authors’ would be an interesting one, however. As would be a political analysis of the knowledge which is spoken in different kinds of authorship, on that sliding scale between the ‘autonomous’ and the ‘moral’ — the ‘personal’ and the ‘political’. Institutional histories of knowledge are plentiful; we have over-politicized human endeavour far and wide.

The History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing has its own Society, SHARP. Their 2006 conference is entitled Trading Books, Trading Ideas.

Ubibook 2: Ubibookmark-up, 13-14 September in the context of the Tomorrow Book, at the Jan van Eyck Academie.

If I well understood the radio, last year counted 700 million tourists world-wide. The amount of money which they spent followed, but I lost that. What to do to make the leisure industry’s sum (logistic, economic) energy for a cause? The industry’s products of course already have significant economic value — they support (form the basis of) many global and local markets. It seems to me however that its huge footprint largely just throws up dust in the ‘grey ecology’, to borrow Virilio’s term.

(...) il y a la pollution des distances, ce que j’appelle la pollution de l’écologie grise. L’écologie grise, c’est-à-dire que tout progrès dans la vitesse réduit à rien l’intervalle de temps et d’espace du champ du monde. Donc le monde se réduit, et il se réduit pour moi concrètement. Bien sûr que l’Atlantique continue de faire quatre cent mille kilomètres, mais ces kilomètres sont disqualifiés. D’une certaine façon, la pollution des distances ne dégrade pas la nature, comme c’est le cas quand une forêt est abîmée par les pluies acides. Elle dégrade quelque chose qui est peut-être plus important pour l’homme que la nature, elle dégrade la grandeur nature, c’est-à-dire la dimension même du monde.

Note: large numbers easily invite speculation of the ‘what to do with all that energy’ kind.

The remarkable James Lucket (‘a housewife a teacher and an occasional caterer’) of Consumptive leads me to the del.icio.us bookmark base, where one publishes and tags bookmarks: commented links, ‘folksonomy’. This is BTW what I meant when I wrote that the luxury of writing is reading. It’s how you come across stuff.

I remember having heard about it but rather amazingly completely overlooked it after. It definitely is good web use. I start one for myself. It makes one read and write and link. Imagine doing one in lieu of a weblog.

Note: inflation of everything “social”. Social technology?... social software?... social bookmarking?! Shouldn’t that be ‘shared’, or even simply ‘public’? There’s a huge craving for social. It makes one wonder what really happened to community life. Next doors, the street, the neighbourhood, the village, the class room, work floor, peer group. A ‘social’ bias has pervaded information media and network culture from the very start. We have not become any more, nor less, social than we have always been. Let alone better organized. Don’t start me on the technological, or design, or media fix.

We know splendid isolation. We browse books. In there is content in words and images on pages. We browse sites. In there is links in documents, represented by words and images on screen. We go to galleries and museums and parks and plazas. Where there are art works in white or not so white cubes, and on green lawns. All such spaces — even while they might be public — are also, to a certain degree, enclosed, confined; through their confinement they help defining the contained content’s perception and reception. Splendid isolation renders contrast which the object of attention would otherwise lack, if it would be immersed in the everyday, media, life at large. Isolation is the technical condition of the sign. Isolation contrasts. Contrast is a prerequisite of perception and reading.

Complementary Currencies Resource Center. Complementary economies keep coming back to me. It just seems right to live by trade and exchange. Every living wo/man knows what to gain, what to learn, to share and to offer in return. If no beneficial shared interest can form the basis of a fair exchange, than a third medium comes in handy: a medium which everyone has an interest in because it buys you stuff everytime when a swap is impossible: ecce money. Still, if I trade my meat grinder for your goat cheese and lamb chop, another benefit comes into the deal than when we would have charged each other money. There’s plenty that money cannot buy and trust is just one of those things.

With my attention for the house and the home also Gaston Bachelard returns from the shelf. Actually his PoS was on a pile of books gathered to form the backdrop of my Witte Raaf text, ‘Owner, Inhabitant, House deliverer’. It is in Dutch, Eigenaar, bewoner, huisbezorger, over at lemoulindumerle.com/huisbezorger.

The LETS browse wake contains other complementary trades, ecology and sustainability links. They will later go to del.icio.us.

Actually the main reason to restart NQP is that both the logic and true benefit of writing is reading — to feed in order to be fed. Not only did I not write for NQP (yet for another publication), neither did I read my friends’ publications (unless they emailed me). I had no sense for the blogosphere. But the book and other old media push the envelope, since the one can not do without the other anymore.

September at JvE will see the start of the Tomorrow Book research programme, in which context also Ubiscribe will make sort of a comeback: book my drift. Just like we repeat sites in sites, we repeat books in books, all a matter of plenty exercise. From the Multiple. Multiply. Multiplication cover I make in 198?, which shows exhibition curator Ine Gevers’ pregnancy ultra-sound scan and which’ contents are all faux-facsimiles from never published tomes by the participating artists, to the Max Stirner ego-and-own book/grave slide which will open my talk on 913-914, media go to prove that we are not here to be remembered — and yet. We live by the dead and the book and obsolete links and chance updates. The book indeed is architecture, another media mausoleum, another grave. And: it is not a magazine. Book property: sustainability.

Wonder if that site is still up? Why certainly. Media die every day.

Michael Bakunin, What is Authority?

In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or the engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure. I do not content myself with consulting a single authority in any special branch; I consult several; I compare their opinions, and choose that which seems to me the soundest. But I recognise no infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such or such individual, I have no absolute faith in any person. Such a faith would be fatal to my reason, to my liberty, and even to the success of my undertakings; it would immediately transform me into a stupid slave, an instrument of the will and interests of others.

(...) there is no fixed and constant authority, but a continual exchange of mutual, temporary, and, above all, voluntary authority and subbordination.

At the La Charité s/ Loire (‘ville du livre’) annual market I find 1975 Max Ernst and 1965 Michael Bakunin. Ernst started to talk to me about a year ago when I prepared enclavexquise; Bakunin I never read. I browse his small ... Liberté volume and come across some good soundbites. Its cover design is a sign of the times — bold black capital type on a faux-kraft paper image. The market is great for cover shopping, for elegant early 20C French literary titles, or late 19C gardening and household and cuisine manuals. Then there is the collaborative titles of literary and visual artists’ works. It is a very hot day to browse books though. Besides we celebrate R’s 12th birthday. From the market we engage in a Loire border pick-nick. I will get back to my books later. For the moment between bites and sips we flip Roemer’s Histoire du LEGO.

Max Stirner

In the early morning search ’n browse spree, from different sources I am led back to Max Stirner. Then in Wikipedia this quote is in the Stirner lemma:

(...) authors, ideologists and philosophers [who] have cited, quoted or otherwise referred to Max Stirner (...) include (...) several writers of the situationist movement, and Max Ernst, who titled a 1925 painting L'unique et sa propriÈté. (Perhaps the most significant figure to have been influenced by Stirner has been the notorious antiartist Marcel Duchamp , who seems to have made a significant break with his former concerns just when he was formulating his most important work, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bacherlors, Even (1915-23), which was, according to the best reconstructions that have been attempted, already in his mind several years earlier when certain commentators, perhaps most notably the Duchamp scholar Francis Naumann , believe Duchamp first encountered the work of Stirner.)

Max Ernst! I am as much back in La Charité as in Enclavexquise as in my new studio.

A tiny 12 square meter semi-open studio is swept clean where in winter times the fire wood is stored. Its barred door gives access to the North courtyard, onto the vegetable garden and chicken run. Believe it or not, here I have gathered some old paints, canvases and other material. I got that brush and surface feeling again when last week I painted a target for the annual school fair.

Actually to restart this publication is harder than I thought it would be. This is mainly because you do not want to start right where you left off, but a bit further on, as if you had learned a thing or two during the absence. Since February I write many Dutch words in an online journal, shared with two Amsterdam mothers. We post between the three of us with family looking over our shoulders. I started the everyday notes dedicated to Rolf and Roemer and their friends, sons and daughters of friends of ours.

In vita informativa informatic license is leveraged by contemporary media consumption/production complicity.

Read: P, as in private; P, as in public; P, as in Property.

Art and disorder

What Can Artists Who Experience Brain Disease Teach Us About the Brain and Behavior? In a September 2004 BrainBlog (‘news about our knowledge of the brain and behavior’) I rediscover Anjan Chatterjee.

Artists with neuropsychological deficits do not necessarily produce art of lesser quality. Rather, their art may change in content or in style, sometimes in surprising and aesthetically pleasing ways.

Context (‘sampling new cultural context’) looks into other Art/Disorder related issues: Creativity and autism spectrum disorders.

The nature of artistic creativity and its relationship with ‘difference’ has intrigued people for centuries. The Genesis of Artistic Creativity is a revealing exploration of the lives of 21 famous writers, philosophers, musicians and painters.

There is a whole issue of conceptual and craft control (‘kunst komt van kunnen’, ‘kunst komt van kennen’) and reception (‘kunst komt van context’) and the control over reception (‘kunst komt van media’) which is not considered in these discussions, like if art would be a work of nature and even (or justly) sick nature would incite art. There is no guarantee for art to emerge, ever. Don’t bang your head against the wall for it at home, kids.

unpacking TAZoo after some 8 years
photo by Paul Perry, 17 June 2005 at the MuHKA, Antwerp

Privilege of private

A contemporary art world is a closed system museum business symbolic economy. An expanded media cube, with projections on all its 6 planes. What’s to worry? The museum as a temple is history. A better museum as the new place for artistic excellence has not yet emerged. Any kind of new concept excellence — be it in politics, social organization, communication — has to be looked for outside a museological context, even outside an accepted conceptual context of ‘art’, ‘design’, ‘media’. The museum will have to go find out what splendid isolation might bring a contemporary audience.

I like to believe Joke Robaard when she says that initiatives are happening, right now, to be searched for. I have seen for myself over the past 8, 9 years wild publishing happening online, which feeds my best hopes for cultural production to develop a new urgency, a new truth even, if you like. To quote artist Arnulf Rainer: ‘Every doubt with art is a doubt with one’s own work’. I agree.

What are developments, in which fields, that would urge a new kind of excellence on aesthetic production? To read art as knowledge is something which could reconnect artists, curators, institutions, publications — over a variety of diciplines and constituencies. The public and political will grow from the private. The private holds the promise of multiple, rich privacies, without privilege.

Some of my present attention is invested in the exploration of the private, in a time when it is reduced to legal terms of ‘privacy’, as that undeniable right to be on your own, anonymous, autonomous. Having a private life has little to do with this. A private life can be perfectly at ease with little privacy, even feed on publicity. (...)